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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

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Lincoln 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSnv 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

AN ESSAY 



By Joseph Fort Newton 




Cedar Rapids, Iowa 
Published by The Torch Press 

MDCCCCX 



A n address made before the members of The State Histor- 
ical Society of Iowa Oftd the Mississippi Valley Historical 
Association, Iowa City, Iowa, May 25, 1910, and published 
in this form, by the courtesy of The State Historical So- 
ciety of Iowa 



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iSnceW*™ 



COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY 
THE TORCH PRESS 



<C)^.k'>l^uZ 



TO MY FATHER, WHO FOUGHT ABRAHAM 
LINCOLN, THIS ESSAY IS INSCRIBED BY ONE 
WHO REVERES THE MEMORY OF BOTH 



The Torch Series 
Edited by Joseph Fort Newton 



*' We are not enemies, hut friends. We 
must not he enemies. Though passion 
may have strained, it must not hreaJc 
our honds of affection. The mystic cords 
of memory, stretching from every hat- 
tlefield and patriot grave, to every liv- 
ing heart and hearth-stone, all over this 
hroad land, will yet swell the chorus of 
the Union, when again touched, as surely 
they will he, hy the hetter angels of our 
nature.' ' 




ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

IT IS not easy to speak of Lincoln 
calmly. He was a man of such high 
and tender humanity, of personality 
so appealing and pathos so melting, that 
almost every study of him ends in a blur 
of eulogy. No higher tribute could be 
paid to any man, yet that was just what 
he did not like and the reason why he 
refused, in his later years, to read biog- 
raphy. He had no vanity, and being a 
man of humor he did not pose, nor did 
he wish any one to draw him other than 
he was. But men can no more help lov- 
ing and praising him than they can help 
loving and praising surpassing goodness 
anywhere. His very honesty in sim- 
plicity makes him all the more winning, 
and to this day he puzzles any artist for 
that he was so unlike any model. 

Lincoln was a great and simple man, 

7 



so simple that many deemed him darkly 
deep ; and, like all simple men, he had a 
certain mystery about him; a mystery 
too simple to be found out. That is to 
say, he was a man who seemed complex 
because, in the midst of many complex- 
ities, he was, after all, simple ; an un- 
common man with common principles 
and virtues, who grew up in the back- 
yard of the republic and ascended to 
power in a time of crisis. His later fame, 
so unlike his early life, made men stare, 
because they had not seen the steps he 
took along the road. His genius was 
home-spun, not exotic. It does not daz- 
zle or baffle, does not bewilder or amaze, 
and is thus an example and a legacy of 
inspiration. Yet no one who saw him 
ever saw another like him. He was 
unique. He stood apart. He was him- 
self — original, genuine, simple, sincere. 
The more we know about him the greater 
he seems to be in his totality of powers, 
none of which was supremely great, but 
all of which, united and held in poise, 
made him at once so universal and so 
unique. 

8 



Behind Lincoln, as the background of 
his life, lay the wide melancholy of the 
western plain, its low hills, its shifting 
sky, its shadowy forests and winding 
streams, and the hardship and hazard 
of pioneer days. There we see the lad 
in the log cabin, studying by a dim fire- 
light ; the rail-splitter and the reader of 
books; the flat-boatman going far down 
the rivers — a strange, heroic, pathetic 
story which still awaits the touch of a 
master hand. Then appears the tall, 
gawky captain in the Black Hawk AVar, 
clad in a suit of blue jeans, sworn into 
the service by Jefferson Davis ; the post- 
master at New Salem who carried his 
office in his hat ; the surveyor whose out- 
fit was sold for debt ; the village sceptic, 
fabulist and athlete ; and the young man 
standing white and forlorn at the grave 
of a country girl, whose image he kept in 
his heart wrapped in the sweet and aw- 
ful sadness of the valley of shadows. 

Those early days return in all their 
monotony of privation and toil, full of 

9 



the patience that could walk down a lonj? 
road without turning, brightened by 
dutifulness alone, pointed but not 
cheered by wayside anecdote, until by 
struggle and sorrow he became a man. 
He was inured to hardship and poverty, 
rarely ill, wiry, stalwart and a man of 
regular habit; having a certain innate 
dignity and charm of nature, despite his 
ungainly figure and ill-fitting garb ; and 
what he was he had made himself. Hav- 
ing a mind too broad and grave for the 
details of life, he was as indifferent to 
the arts of society as he was to the beauty 
of trees and flowers. A master of men 
and at ease with them, he had no skill 
with women, and was never so awk- 
ward and clumsy as when in their pres- 
ence. At the grave of Ann Rutledge 
he vowed, it is said, never to marry ; but 
within a few months he was entangled 
again, learning from Mary Owens the 
comedy of love as before he had learned 
its tragedy. Seldom has there been such 
a blend of crudities and refinements, of 
ambitions and renunciations, of haunt- 
ing beauties and gnarled angularities. 

10 



No man ever had fewer illusions about 
himself and the world, and he did not 
expect great destiny to come to him as 
a lottery prize. He knew there must be 
work, patience, wisdom, disappointment ; 
he was not sanguine of himself, but he 
rated no eminence or honor too high or 
too difficult to attain. Never petulant 
but sometimes moody, he was fond of 
solitude, and would often sit for hours 
dead to the world and buried in thought. 
At other times a cloud would fall over 
his face, and he was the most hopeless 
and forlorn of mortals, as though tor- 
tured by some hidden sorrow, or brood- 
ing over some wrong that never in time 
or eternity could be set right. When the 
shadow lifted he was himself again, be- 
guiling the hours with the aptness and 
ingenuities of his anecdotes — some of 
them, it is true, more cogent than del- 
icate, though he tolerated smuttiness 
only when it was disinfected by humor. 
He was strangely reserved in friendship, 
rarely surrendering entire confidence, 
and those who knew him best were 
younger than himself. All the while he 

// 



seemed to know everybody, yet only a 
few ever felt that they knew him. 

So we meet him in 1840, making his 
way slowly, unhappy, ambitious, and 
alone. He owned a horse and was fond 
of riding, but he made a poor income 
and often went to bed with no notion of 
how he should meet the claims of the 
morrow. For nearly one-fifth part of his 
life he owed money he could not pay, 
and while of easy disposition, debt galled 
him and hastened his wrinkles. His 
marriage, though not without its jars, 
was in every way advantageous to him. 
It whetted his industry, did not nurse 
too much the penchant for home indo- 
lence that he had, and taught him, par- 
ticularly, that there was such a thing as 
society, which observes a man's boots as 
well as his principles. He was always 
a loyal and reverent husband, a gentle 
but not positive father, and the towering 
ambition of his wife out-topped his own. 
Yet, while not lazy, he always loafed a 
little, studying men more than books, 
and reading the signs of the times. 

12 



II 



Just what position Lincoln held at the 
bar in his early years is not easy to 
know. He did not study the law deeply 
until a later time and was never -a 
learned lawyer, as that phrase is now 
used. Most of his practice was on the 
old Eighth Circuit — following the 
judges from one log court-house to an- 
other, always over bad roads and often 
over swollen streams; a kind of life he 
enjoyed for its careless, roving freedom, 
its human comedy, and its rollicking 
comradeship. This is not to say that he 
practiced by his wits, though he trusted 
much to his native gift of speech, and 
for all his doric simplicity and integ- 
rity a shrewder mortal has never lived. 
He was at his best before juries, where 
his knowledge of human nature, his keen 
logic, and his gifts of humor and mim- 
icry came into full play, and where his 
occasional bursts of appeal swept all be- 
fore him. 

But the law is a jealous mistress, and 
so far Lincoln was more absorbed in pol- 

13 



itics than in law. What led him on was 
a little engine of ambition that knew no 
rest, which strove not for riches but for 
honors; and if the fire burned low, his 
wife added fuel. He knew how to play 
the game of politics according to the 
rules thereof, and was not over-nice as 
to methods when no moral principle was 
involved. On one issue, however, — that 
of slavery — he stood firm from the first, 
and neither the allurements of office nor 
the blandishments of good-fellowship 
could move him ; though as a loyal party 
man he was willing to keep his convic- 
tions in abeyance for the sake of party 
harmony and victory. He was never a 
professional politician — that is he did 
not live by holding office, and of the 
$200 made up by his friends for the can- 
vass of 1846 he returned $199.90 un- 
used. 

Of his career in Congress little need be 
said, except that it is valuable chiefly as 
showing us the politician out of which 
the statesman was made. It took a long 
time to make Lincoln ; he was still grow- 
ing when he died. His speeches at this 

14 



time, one of them waggish almost to 
the point of buffoonery, are not edifying, 
least of all when read alongside his sol- 
emn, seer-like words ten years later. 
Some have thought that they could de- 
tect a tone of inner protest in his 
speeches in Congress; but that is the 
error, into which so many have fallen, 
of reading his early years in the light 
of his later days. No; if we are to un- 
derstand Lincoln, we must keep in 
mind his '' talent for growth," and 
watch the slow unfolding of his life. 
But it is true that his stay at the cap- 
ital made him more studious, by mak- 
ing him aware of the defects of his 
early training; while his visit to New 
England showed him, for the first time, 
that the nation had in its bosom two 
antagonistic ideals, both growing every 
day and struggling to be free. He re- 
turned, a subdued man, having seen a 
cloud upon the horizon portentous of 
impending storm. 

No doubt it was a heavenly destiny, 
shaping his end, that sent him back to 
Springfield, and out on the muddy 

15 



roads of the old Eighth Circuit. Po- 
litically he seemed to himself, indeed, 
a man without a future, but that was 
less important than the fact that he was 
not prepared for the future that await- 
ed him. Even at forty he was singu- 
larly immature; he had not yet come 
to a full mastery of his powers; and 
the conflicting elements of his nature 
needed to be melted and fused into a 
more solid unity. As has often been 
pointed out, this came at last at the call 
of a great cause, evoking in him a vein 
of mysticism, which, with his canny 
sagacity and his humane pity, more 
and more swayed him; softening all 
that was hard within, and hardening 
all that was soft. Of this we are sure : 
when he returned to public life in 1854, 
he was a changed man, moving with a 
firmer tread, in one way not less frank 
and friendly, but in another a separate 
and detached soul — as one whose eye 
was set on some star visible to himself 
alone. 

16 



Ill 



Thenceforward Lincoln became every 
day more serious, more solitary, more 
studious than ever before. Abjuring 
politics, he studied law in earnest, and 
no man ever had greater power of ap- 
plication than he. Also, he began a 
course of rigid mental discipline with 
the intent to improve his faculties, es- 
pecially his powers of logic and of lan- 
guage. Hence his fondness for Euclid, 
which he carried with him on the cir- 
cuit until he could with ease demon- 
strate all the propositions in the six 
books. In the same way he took up 
German, but he seems never to have at- 
tained to a working mastery of it. Shake- 
speare and the Bible he read devotedly, 
parts of them many times, though he 
did not read either one of them through. 
This fellowship with great books bore 
fruit in a finer feeling for words, and 
the florid rhetoric of his early days be- 
came an aversion. His style became 
simple, forthright, and thrusting, and 
the style was the man. 

/7 



His figure was familiar in Spring- 
field as he strode along from his home 
on Eighth Street to his dingy office in 
the Square. Rarely has an office been 
conducted with less order. He carried 
most of his memoranda in his high hat, 
together with bits of poetry and other 
items clipped from newspapers, of which 
he was an assiduous reader. Ten years 
later a law-student, in cleaning up the 
office, found quantities of Congressional 
garden seed mixed with Whig speeches 
and Abolitionist pamphlets, and some of 
the seed had sprouted in the accumulat- 
ed dirt. Often he needed money, but 
he could not be induced to sue for his 
fees which were so small that his part- 
ner, and even Judge Davis, expostu- 
lated with him. But he worked hard, 
and rapidly developed into one of the 
best trial lawyers in the State. 

As a lawyer Lincoln was an advocate 
rather than a jurist — though he some- 
times sat as judge pro tern for his 
friend David Davis — a ' ' case lawyer, ' ' 
in the phrase of the craft. Averse to 
office drudgery and impatient of tech- 

18 



nicalities, he was singularly lucid in 
stating a case, courteous but searching 
in examining witnesses, forceful and 
sagacious in argument, having a remark- 
able memory for evidence, and when the 
case turned upon human or moral is- 
sues a persuasive advocate. His pres- 
ence was commanding, his denunciation 
terrific, and the spell of his marvelous 
personality gave him an almost occult 
power over juries. Sometimes, though 
not often, his humor won the verdict ; 
but he was not always mild, not always 
funny, and when he was angry it was a 
terrible spectacle. Though his name ap- 
pears in the Illinois Reports in one hun- 
dred and seventy-three cases, his income 
was never more than two or three thou- 
sand dollars a year. 

Life on the old Eighth Circuit was a 
gay one, and Lincoln loved it. Books 
dealing with this period show us pic- 
tures of dramatic court scenes, of fa- 
mous murder trials, of parleying law- 
yers and lying witnesses, of country tav- 
erns where judge and jury, lawyers and 
litigants sat at table together ; of a long, 

19 



gaunt figure stretched on beds too short 
for him, studying by a dim light; of 
story-telling jousts continuing, amidst 
roars of laughter, far into the night. 
Too often he has been portrayed, at this 
time, as a mere fabulist, which was as 
far as possible from the truth, though 
it is true that his humor was brightest 
when his heart was most forlorn. This 
may account for the memories of these 
years of poverty, obscurity, and baffled 
ambition; humor being his door of es- 
cape from pressing thoughts within. 

But fundamentally Lincoln was seri- 
ous, even sad, and while men spoke of 
him as " Old Abe " behind his back, in 
his presence they indulged in no un- 
couth familiarities. His humor — and 
it was humor rather than wit, for he was 
essentially a poet and a man of pathos 
— lay close to that profound and in- 
scrutable melancholy which clung to him 
and tinged all his days; the shadow, 
perhaps, of some pre-natal gloom woven 
in the soul of his mother, and deepened, 
no doubt, by a temperament which felt 
the tragedy in mortal things. It was 

20 



not for his humor that men loved him, 
nor yet for his intellect, with its blend 
of integrity and shrewdness, which all 
admired, but for his manliness, his sim- 
plicity, his sympathy, and for much else 
which we feel even now and cannot de- 
scribe. To this day, men who were close 
to Lincoln have a memory as of some- 
thing too deep for speech. They re- 
count his doings, they recall his words, 
they tell his stories, but they always 
leave something untold: only a light 
comes into their eyes, and one realizes 
what a well-founded reverence is. 

Of his inner life during those buried 
years — from 1848 to 1854 — only a few 
glimpses remain, but they show that it 
was a time of revolution and crisis. 
Mentally he 'was occupied as never be- 
fore with those questions which every 
man, soon or late, must settle for him- 
self; that-Qjincoln met and made terms 
with theM is certain, but by what pro- 
cess we know not. So also the great na- 
tional question, which lay upon him like 
the weight of a personal care. His eulogy 
of Henry Clay, while not a great speech, 

21 



revealed that he was convinced that the 
slavery question could no longer be com- 
promised, and what a fearful looking for, 
of judgment to come, was foreshadowed 
in his closing words. Before his public 
call came he had passed the whole prob- 
lem through his silent thought, studying 
it from both sides, and from end to end 
— a fact which should be kept in mind 
by those who imagine that his speeches 
were made as if hy magic. But to the 
end of his life, amidst the whirl of pol- 
itics and the storm of war, his circuit- 
riding days were invested for him with 
a grave and joyous memory. 

IV 

Whatever may have been the motives 
of Stephen A. Douglas in repealing the 
Missouri Compromise — and they are as 
muddy today as they were in 1854 — 
he precipitated a revolution, and became 
the avant courier of Civil War. Lincoln, 
now in the prime of his powers, was on 
his feet to refute the new dogma and to 
challenge the man who had wrought such 

22 



mischief; and there followed a debate, 
continuing at intervals from 1854 to 
1858, memorable in the annals of the 
nation. If, as the story runs, it was a 
sleepy old game of whist that led to the 
repeal of that Compact, the conflict did 
not again cease until slavery was de- 
stroyed in the fire kindled by its friends. 
Only a few men, said Edmund Burke, 
really see what passes before their eyes, 
and Lincoln was one of them. By nature 
a watcher of the signs of the times, he 
did not read them amiss, but he was 
slow to admit, even to himself, the bitter 
truth as he saw it. Hating slavery, he yet 
recognized its constitutional existence 
and legal rights, and saw no way of deal- 
ing with it except to push it back into a 
corner and let it die. What he feared 
more than all else was a clash between 
the radicals of the North and the hot- 
spurs of the South, and a rush to arms. 
He brooded over the abyss gloomily, and 
his keen logic, touched with passionate 
earnestness, gave his speech a luminous 
solidity rare in the history of eloquence. 

23 



Even his jealousy of Douglas served the 
better to point his logic with tips of fire. 
Wary, discreet, and politic, he did not 
come forward to speak and act until he 
was fully satisfied that the time was ripe, 
and no one was ever a better judge of the 
temper of the hour. Often his feelings 

— intense and almost volcanic at times 

— pressed hard for hot words and radical 
measures, but he bit his lips, to use his 
own phrase, and kept quiet — jotting 
down his thoughts on scraps of paper and 
stowing them away in his high hat. Some 
of those fugitive pieces have been pre- 
served, and they show with what keen 
and searching logic he had gone to the 
bottom of his subject. So that when 
he uttered his word the whole man was 
in it, and his oratory was logic on fire, 
all the more effective for its evident re- 
straint of passion not less than for its 
austere lucidity of style. 

When he replied to Douglas during the 

State Fair in October, 1854, he was an 

obscure man, known as a shrewd lawyer, 

a story-teller, and a Whig of anti-slav- 

24 



ery leanings. But when he had finished, 
men of all parties knew that a new leader 
had come, the equal of Douglas in debate 
— • a man of genius ablaze with passion. 
For four hours the circuit-riding attor- 
ney unfolded and described the great is- 
sue with a mastery of facts, a logical 
strategy, and a penetration of insight 
that astonished even his friends. Never 
did the pet dogma of Douglas receive a 
more thorough ventilation, while the Sen- 
ator himself sat on a front bench, not 
twelve feet away, intently listening. 
There were warm passages between them 
as the afternoon ran along, but Lincoln 
kept his temper, even under the most 
provoking taunts, and his readiness of 
retort delighted the vast throng. One 
who heard that speech has left this mem- 
ory: 

It was a warmish day, and Lincoln 
was in his shirt sleeves. Although 
awkward, he was not in the least em- 
barrassed. He began in a slow and 
hesitating manner, but it was evident 
that he had mastered his subject, and 

25 



that he knew he was right. He had a 
high-pitched, falsetto voice that could 
be heard a long distance in spite of the 
bustle of the crowd. He had the ac- 
cent and pronunciation peculiar to his 
native State, Kentucky. His gestures 
were made with his body and his head 
rather than with his hands, and were 
the natural expression of the man. 
Gradually he warmed up with his 
subject, his angularity disappeared, 
and he passed into that attitude of 
unconscious majesty so conspicuous in 
Saint-Gaudens 's statue at the entrance 
of Lincoln Park in Chicago. His lis- 
teners felt that he believed every word 
he said, and that, like Luther, he would 
go to the stake rather than abate one 
jot or tittle of it. In such moments 
he was the type of the ancient Hebrew 
prophet. 

Twelve days later the rivals met in 
debate at Peoria, where Lincoln repeated 
his Springfield effort, but in an improved 
form both as to compactness of argument 
and forcefulness of style. Fortunately 
he wrote out the speech — from memory, 

26 



for he did not use notes — and it remains 
to this day one of the imperishable utter- 
ances of the slavery debates, if not of 
our entire history. Some think it su- 
perior to Webster's reply to Hayne, be- 
cause its theme is loftier and its scope 
wider. Others hold it to be the superior 
of the two as an example of English style, 
making up in its simplicity, directness 
and lucidity wiiat it lacks of the massive 
movement and rhythmic flow of the Web- 
sterian diction. In after years Lincoln 
regarded the Peoria address as perhaps 
the ablest speech he had ever made, and 
while it contained few of those phrases 
which in his later speeches became popu- 
lar slogans, its austerity of restraint gave 
it an added impressiveness and force. 

What arrests one in all his speeches 
was the spirit of sympathy and justice 
shown towards the people of the South, 
against whom he had no unkindly feel- 
ing. They were his kinsmen, and he 
knew their situation, many of whom hated 
slavery but knew not how to rid them- 
selves of it. He was aware that interest 

27 



and long usage had blinded their judg- 
ment, just as like interest and usage 
would have blinded the moral sense of 
the people of the North. He did not 
hold the South solely responsible for 
slavery, though he felt that they should 
long ago have devised some system of 
gradual emancipation. Unlike the Abol- 
ition orators, he did not dwell on the 
cruelty of slavery, but he left no doubt 
as to his feeling that it was grossly 
wrong, unjust, and unwise. While he 
did not plead for abolition, he had none 
of the spirit of concession to mere prop- 
erty interest that ruined Webster, and 
spoke always as one to whom the moral 
issue was vividly alive. Until the Dred 
Scott decision swept away all hope, he 
continued to urge the restoration of the 
Spirit of Compromise, without which he 
saw one side aggressive, the other retal- 
iating — and in the end War. 

Yet, for all his calm restraint and 
wise conservatism, Lincoln was a man of 
fiery nature, and there were occasional 
gleams of a slumbering lightning which 

28 



he hardly dared to use. Once at least, 
at Bloomington in 1856, his impenetrable 
reserve gave way, his pent-up brooding 
passion rushed forth into flaming speech, 
and his words swayed and quivered as if 
charged with electricity. But it was not 
so much slavery as the threat of disunion 
that stirred him, disclosing at once the 
issue and the leader, and his thrilling ap- 
peal fused the discordant elements of his 
audience into a solid and victorious 
party. Every hair of his head stood on 
end, fire seemed to flash from his little 
grey eyes, and the whole man was ablaze 
when he said, with a tragic earnestness 
that almost lifted men from their seats: 
''We will say to the Southern disunion- 
ists, we won't go out of the Union and 
you shan't V' Of that speech Herndon 
wrote in a lecture, twelve years later: 

The Bloomington speech was the 
one grand effort of his life. The 
smothered fire broke out ; his eyes were 
aglow ; he felt justice ; he stood before 
the throne of the eternal Right. It 
was logic; it was pathos; it was en- 

29 



thusiasm ; it was justice, equity, truth 
and right set ablaze by the divine fires 
of a soul maddened by the wrong; it 
was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, back- 
ed with wrath. If Mr. Lincoln was 
six feet four inches high usually, at 
Bloomington that day he was seven 
feet, and inspired at that. 

Most men receive from their audience 
in vapor what they return in flood, but 
it was not after that manner that Lin- 
coln was eloquent. With a great crowd 
before him his thought seemed to be 
moving in remote and lonely regions, as 
one who saw things in the large and 
from afar. His appeal was not so much 
to his audience as to the individual man 
of whom it was composed, and to what 
was highest in every one of them. He 
believed that the human soul, when sep- 
arated from the tumults which commonly 
disturb it, cannot refuse to respond to 
the voice of righteousness and reason, 
and his faith acted like a spell upon 
those who heard him. Each man seemed 
to stand apart from the throng, and in 
those great hours when the speaker 



stood as one transfigured and inspired 
men felt that their own souls spoke to 
them in the tones of the orator. He 
rarely, if ever, raised his hand above his 
head in gesture, and he had almost none 
of the hypnotic magnetism which legend 
attributes to him. His very voice, so 
keen and thin, with little feeling of har- 
mony in it, and little variety of cadence ; 
his enunciation, so careful, so deliberate, 
and at times so hesitating ; his restrained 
manner, in which there was nothing of 
the daring reckless freedom of the pop- 
ular agitator — all these added to the 
impression that he was a man of au- 
thentic tidings. Such eloquence is pos- 
sible only in times of great crises, and 
Lincoln spoke with the ultimate grace 
of simplicity at an hour when the right 
word fell with the authority of an ap- 
parition. 

V 

After all, history is only past politics, 
and those who imagine that Lincoln wait- 
ed for honors to be thrust upon him do 

31 



not know the man whom Herndon, his 
partner, knew. Had he been such a guile- 
less Parsifal in politics he could never 
have dominated his party in Illinois, dic- 
tated its platforms, and guided it into a 
moderate and wise course. Still less 
could he have met the astute, artful, mas- 
terful Douglas, whose resourcefulness 
was only surpassed by his unctuous and 
persuasive sophistry. An example of his 
far-reaching sagacity, too often over- 
looked, may be seen in the crisis of 1858. 

With the revolt of Douglas against the 
Buchanan regime came a quick turn of 
events which bafifled the most astute, and 
deceived some of the very elect. Rumors 
were adrift to the effect that ''the Little 
Giant," having defied the Slave Party, 
might follow the logic of his position. On 
one issue at least he was already stand- 
ing with the Republicans, and there were 
those who hailed his coming over to the 
party with great joy. Though a sinner 
somewhat late in returning, they con- 
ceived that he might still further repent 
of his sin against the peace and good 

32 



faith of the nation. Outside of Illinois, 
the party seemed almost willing to let 
by-gones be by-gones and to accept Doug- 
las into the ranks as a leader. Stranger 
things had happened, and the suggestion 
gathered momentum and plausibility as 
it spread. 

One after another men like Seward, 
Wilson, Colfax, and Greeley, were won 
to this view, some going so far as to inti- 
mate, as a practical expedient, that the 
party demand might be softened in order 
to admit so able a convert. At last 
Greeley — honest, well-meaning, but ill- 
advised — • actually urged the Republi- 
cans of Illinois not to put up a candidate 
against Douglas in the coming contest for 
the Senate. No one now believes that 
Douglas ever had any intention of going 
over to the Republican party ; but in the 
new turn of affairs he did see, as he 
thought, a chance of attaching that party, 
or a part of it, to the tail of his kite. 
Having breached the Democracy, if he 
could divide the Republican party he 
might be able to harness one of its steeds 

33 



with his Democratic donkey and ride first 
into the Senate, and then into the White 
House. It was a daring scheme, but not 
at all impossible, and it would have suc- 
ceeded had not it been for the courage, 
fidelity, and sagacity of Lincoln and a 
little coterie of friends. 

One has only to read the letters of 
Lincoln to learn that he had the ambitions 
of a man ; but it must also be said that in 
this crisis, though his own political future 
was involved, personal motives were sec- 
ondary. Indeed, he had more than once 
shown his willingness to stand aside for 
other men who were true to the right star 
— for Trumbull in 1854, to go no farther 
back. But he could not sit still and see 
the party which had fought the repeal 
of the Missouri Compromise, had surviv- 
ed the defeat of 1856, and had risen to 
new life under the staggering blow of the 
Dred Scott decision, fall into the hands 
of a man whom he regarded as a trimmer, 
a trickster, and a political gambler. So 
that when the wily Senator returned in 
triumph to Chicago, feeling that his fight 

34 



in behalf of Kansas had won the day, he 
found, to his amazement, that Lincoln 
had dictated an issue which threw him 
upon the defensive. 

Today the words of Lincoln at Spring- 
field on June 16, 1858, march before us 
with the solemn foot-fall of destiny. Even 
to the men who heard them, on that sum- 
mer day, they seemed heavy with awful 
prophecies. If radicalism means rooted- 
ness, in that utterance he placed his party 
on a basis so radical that Douglas dared 
not follow. He not only rescued his 
party from an unholy alliance ; he saved 
it from apostacy and ruin. Against the 
advice of all his friends, except Herndon, 
he said : 

A house divided against itself cannot 
stand. I believe this government can- 
not endure permanently half -slave and 
half-free. I do not expect the Union 
to be dissolved — I do not expect the 
house to fall — but I do expect it will 
cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing or all the other. Either the 
opponents of slavery will arrest the 
further spread of it, and place it where 

35 



the public mind shall rest in the belief 
that it is in the course of ultimate ex- 
tinction; or its advocates will push it 
forward till it shall become alike law- 
ful in all the States, old as well as 
new, North as well as South. 

Small wonder that the whole nation 
watched the debate which followed, where 
Shiloh was fought at Ottawa and Gettys- 
burg at Freeport. When Lincoln found 
himself competing for the Senatorship 
with the quickest and most popular de- 
bater in the nation, he saw nothing odd 
or dramatic about it; not that he had 
self-conceit, but that he was aware of his 
powers and thought the opportunity pos- 
sible ; having prepared his speeches while 
watching the flies on the ceiling of his 
dingy back office. Douglas, with his 
powerful voice and facile energy, went 
into the campaign at full speed. Lin- 
coln began cautiously, but when they 
came out of it Douglas was worn down 
with rage and hoarseness, while Lincoln 
was fresher than ever. His opponent 
was often arrogant and testy in his pres- 

36 



ence, but he, rarely flurried and seldom 
angry, so grew that when, though de- 
feated for the Senate, he entered the 
White House at last, Douglas was less as- 
tonished than any one else — and held 
his hat while he took the oath of office. 

In political philosophy Lincoln was a 
Henry Clay Whig with strong anti-slav- 
ery sentiments, never an Abolitionist, 
never an advocate of ^'the higher law." 
Like all great reformers, at least in the 
earlier stage of their career, his ideals 
were more frequently in the past than in 
the future, and he began, not without 
hesitation, a pruning of gross abuses, a 
reverting to the healthy simplicity of 
by-gone times. Like Shibli Bagarag in 
' ' The Shaving of Shagpat, ' ' — publish- 
ed by George Meredith the same year — 
he began by proposing a friendly and 
conservative shave for the Slave Despot. 
True to the nature of tyranny, the Slave 
Power waxed exceeding angry, until its 
face was like a berry in a bush ; but when 
Shagpat had to be shaved thoroughly, 
our Shibli was equal to the task. 

37 



Amidst threatening chaos he ascended 
from a country law office to the high place 
of power as if it were a matter of course, 
giving to Herndon — his friend, his 
partner, and his indefatigable fellow- 
worker in a great human cause — per- 
mission to use the firm name, as before, 
without a conscious trait of poetry; yet 
looking to the far future with a longing 
that was poetry. Though one was taken 
and the other left, and a great war rolled 
between them, the old shingle still hung 
in the bare stairway until death dissolved 
the partnership. One who wrote to 
Herndon asking if his partner was 
strong enough and firm enough to under- 
take his task, received this reply: 

I know Lincoln better than he knows 
himself. I know this seems a little 
strong, but I risk the assertion. Lin- 
coln is a man of heart — aye, as gen- 
tle as a woman 's and as tender — but 
he has a will as strong as iron. He 
therefore loves all mankind, hates 
slavery and every form of despotism. 
Put these together and you can form 
your own conclusion. Lincoln will 

38 



fail here, namely, if a question of po- 
litical economy — if any question 
comes up which is doubtful, question- 
able, which no man can demonstrate, 
then his friends can rule him; but 
when on Justice, Right, Liberty, the 
Government, the Constitution, and the 
Union, then you may all stand aside : 
he will rule then, and no man can 
move him — no set of men can do it. 
There is no fail here. This is Lincoln, 
and you mark my prediction. You 
and I must keep the people right; God 
will keep Lincoln right. 

VI 

Of leaders of men there are two kinds. 
One sees the thing as it ought to be and 
is to be, and condemns all else that falls 
below the ideal. They are reformers, 
agitators, and sometimes iconoclasts — 
dreamers who know not the slow ways 
whereby dreams are wrought into real- 
ity. They are noble in their fealty to 
high ideals; by their burning zeal they 
make us feel and think; but by a sure 
instinct we refuse to entrust the reins of 

39 



power into their hands. Amidst the 
tangle of legal rights and practical ne- 
cessities, of conflicting interests and con- 
stitutional provisions, they are helpless. 
That they see no difficulties is their vir- 
tue; that others see all the difficulties is 
perhaps a greater virtue; and it would 
be trite to say that the nation needed, 
and needs, both virtues. As a fact, in 
the case of the abolition of slavery the 
radical and violent solution of the ideal- 
ists had at last to be adopted. 

The other kind of leader sees the ideal 
no less clearly, nor is he less loyal to it. 
But he also sees things as they are, sees 
them steadily and sees them whole, and 
tries patiently and wisely to work out 
the best results with the forces with 
which he has to deal. He knows that 
men are slow of heart and stumbling of 
step, and he does not run so far ahead 
of them that they lose sight of him and 
stop ; he knows how to get along with 
ordinary humanity. Such a leader was 
Lincoln — uniting an unwavering fidel- 
ity to a moral ideal with the practical 
acumen to make his dream come true — 

40 



handicapped by all the things that go to 
make up wisdom, yet resolute in his pa- 
tience, his courage, his self-control, and 
in his mastery of his life consistently 
with a high moral purpose. Here lies 
the secret of his statesmanship. No lead- 
er in this land ever stood so close to the 
common people; no one has been at 
once so frank and so subtle. He knew 
the people, he was one of them, and 
they knew and loved and followed him 
— paying to him, and to their country, 
the " last full measure of devotion." 

Like all great leaders, Lincoln was 
by nature conservative, too reverent to 
be cheerfully iconoclastic, and when 
forced to act by the educative and com- 
pulsive power of events, he obeyed the 
majestic genius of Law. He was not 
willing to wreck the Union in order to 
abolish slavery. Intense as were his 
feelings against that awful evil — for 
which North and South were involved 
in a common historic guilt — he refused 
to sink the ship in order to cleanse it. 
He knew that slavery was fixed in the 
law of the land, confessed in the Con- 

41 



stitution, and sanctioned by the courts, 
and his oath of office was a vow to up- 
hold the law. But he also knew that 
slavery was fundamentally wrong — 
both to master and man — and that it 
would have to go at last, because the 
increasing kindness and justice of the 
world were against it. His supreme 
aim, as he wrote to Greeley, was not to 
save or destroy slavery, but to save the 
Union — without slavery if he could, 
with slavery if he must — and from that 
purpose he could not be turned aside. 
He was never an Abolitionist. He re- 
pudiated the dogma of confiscation. He 
held, consistently, that if the nation was 
to free the slaves it should buy them and 
set them free; and this he had it in 
mind to do — but war came, and blood, 
and fire, and 

'' A measureless ocean of human 
tears. ' ' 

From the fall of Arthur Ladd, its 
first victim, to its closing scene, that 
was the saddest and the noblest war that 
ever raged — a Nemesis of national sin 

42 



and the beginning of a new era. Had 
there been such a feeling of national 
unity as now exists, slavery could have 
been checked and ultimately abolished. 
But such a feeling did not exist ; a fatal 
dualism had been growing from the first, 
and finally rent the nation in a conflict 
the prophecy of which was written in 
the whole history of the colonies, if not 
in the annals of England for centuries 
back. So that Lincoln — in whom, as 
Stephens noted, the sentiment of Union 
" rose to the sublimity of a religious 
mysticism ' ' — instead of saving the 
Union, may almost be said to have pre- 
sided at its birth, and witnessed its 
christening with blood and tears. His 
personality was providential, and the 
republic of today, united and free, is 
at once his dream and his memorial. 

VII 

Through it all Lincoln kept his pa- 
tience, his gentleness, his faith, and his 
clear, cool reason, though harassed by 
office-seekers, lampooned by critics, and 

43 



reviled by radicals. In time of tumult 
he was serene, even humorous ; in a tem- 
pest of hatred he was the still center of 
kindness; and his face wore amidst the 
clouds of war the grief of a nation torn 
and bleeding of heart. He demeaned 
himself so nobly in that critical and test- 
ing ordeal, he had such resources of 
sagacity, such refinements of sympathy, 
such wonderful secrets of endurance, 
that no one could fail to be moved and 
humbled, if nothing more, by intercourse 
with him. There he stood, the central 
figure of the conflict, gentle, strong and 
wise, firm as granite if need required, 
yet strangely piteous and sad, bearing 
insult without revenge, doing his duty 
as God gave him to see the right, and 
to this day his very name casts over 
men a solemn and haunting spell. 

As Douglas said, he was ' ' one of those 
peculiar men who perform with admir- 
able skill everything which they under- 
take." Simple in manner, plain in 
speech, his quaint humor and homely 
ways gave him a familiarity of relation 
with the people which few men enjoy, 

44 



and he ruled the nation as if he were 
practicing law. Disasters gathered 
thick upon the fields of battle, and the 
tide of public feeling seemed at times 
to turn against him, but he kept his wits 
and never lost heart. Beneath a mask 
of careless humor and guileless simplic- 
ity he concealed tlie wiles of strategy, 
and was often most anxiously reticent 
when apparently the most indifferent 
and jocular. " His ' cunning ' fairly 
enters the borders of inspiration," said 
Evarts, in a sentence unusually terse for 
Evarts. It might better have been called 
a trinity of shrewdness, tact, and light- 
ning-quickness of expedient, whereby he 
divined the trends of public sentiment 
and piloted the storm of war. Amid the 
wild passions of the hour, and a babel of 
discordant voices, he held aloft the ideals 
of peace through Union, of liberty under 
the law, of mercy in victory. He had no 
vanity, no bitterness, no pettiness, and 
his ingenuity of self-effacement was as 
remarkable as his unwillingness to evade 
duty or escape censure. With his order 
to Meade to follow up the victory he sent 

45 



a note which revealed, like a ray of light, 
what manner of man sat in the White 
House : 

This order is not of record. If you 
are successful you may destroy it, to- 
gether with this note; if you fail, pub- 
lish the order, and I will tahe the re- 
sponsibility. 

No one claims that Lincoln was a mas- 
ter of political science and history; but 
within the range of his knowledge and 
vision, which did not extend far beyond 
the Constitution and laws of his native 
land, he was a statesman. If he suffered 
himself, as he frankly confessed, to be 
guided by events, it was not because he 
had lost sight of principles, still less be- 
cause he was drifting, but because he 
recognized in the events the movement of 
moral forces, which he was bound to heed, 
and the foot-steps of God, which he was 
bound to follow. He sanctioned, though 
he did not originate, the military arrests, 
in the sincere belief that the power was 
given by the Constitution ; and his justi- 
fication of their use was scrupulously de- 

46 



void of sophistry. That he made mis- 
takes in his choice of men, particularly of 
military men, is not denied. Yet noth- 
ing could direct him or any one else to 
the right man except the criterion of ex- 
perience, fearfully costly as it was. Few 
of all those who called him a tyrant, ever 
charged him with personal cruelty, for he 
had set his heart on saving life whenever 
there was the slightest excuse; taking 
time, amidst harassing cares, to mitigate 
the horrors of war, and even to write to 
those who had lost their loved ones on the 
field of battle : 

Dear Madam : I have been shown 
in the files of the War Department a 
statement of the Adjutant-General of 
Massachusetts that you are the mother 
of five sons who have died gloriously 
on the field of battle. I feel how weak 
and fruitless must be any words of 
mine which should attempt to beguile 
you from the grief of a loss so over- 
whelming. But I cannot refrain from 
tendering to you the consolation that 
may be found in the thanks of the Re- 
public they died to save. I pray that 

47 



our heavenly Father may assuage the 
anguish of your bereavement, and 
leave you only the cherished memory of 
the loved and lost, and the solemn pride 
that must be yours to have laid so cost- 
ly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. 

History has made record of those aw- 
ful years when the bravest of men, ar- 
rayed in long lines of blue and grey, 
were cut down like grass. Events 
marched rapidly; the slaves were freed, 
the armies of the South melted away, 
and the hand that guided the war was 
held out in brotherly forgiveness. The 
men of the future, looking back from 
afar, unbiased and clear-eyed, will say 
that the noblest feat of the genius of Lin- 
coln was the policy he outlined for deal- 
ing with the South after the war. There 
was no rancor in it, no gleam of selfish 
pride in power, but a magnanimity in 
triumph that led Tolstoi to say of him 
that he was " a Christ in miniature.^' 
His words had in them, toward the end, 
a tenderly solemn, seer-like quality, a 
strain as of blended prophecy and pity. 
There was on him, then, something of 

48 



that touch of gentleness in sadness, as 
if presaging doom; and this it was that 
men felt when they caught his eye, which 
so many said they could never forget. 
His death filled the nation with awe akin 
to that evoked by the great tragedies — 
something of inevitability, much of mys- 
tery, as impossible to account for as it is 
to measure the heavens or to interpret 
the voices of the winds. 

VIII 

It has been said — by Thomas Car- 
lyle — that the religion of a man is the 
chief fact with regard to him. If we 
seek for this primary thing in Lincoln, 
it is found not in his use of Bible imag- 
ery — though parts of the Bible were 
written in his memory — nor yet in his 
words of goodwill to the men of this or 
that sect, but in the fiber of his soul, the 
qualities of his mind, and most of all in 
the open book of his life. His faith was 
so much a part of his being that one 
must analyze him in order to find it ; his 
mind was so moral, and his morality so 

49 





intelligent, that they cannot be set the 
one over against the other. In his ele- 
mental qualities of courage, honor and 
loyalty to truth and the ideal, his melt- 
ing pity and delicate justice, the faith 
on which he acted is unveiled as it could 
not be revealed in any list of dogmas. 
For surely, as far as mortal may, he 
exemplified the spirit of Jesus in his life, 
and it is there that we must look for the 
real religion of the man. 

Lincoln had a profound and penetrat- 
ing intellect, but it was practical not 
speculative. Of the skyey genius of 
Plato and Emerson he had none. Emer- 
son he did not understand, but he loved 
Channing and Theodore Parker. Such 
a mind is never radical, nor does it out- 
run the facts to see what the end of 
things will be. It deals with realities, 
not theories, suspects its own enthusi- 
asms, and is content to take one step at 
a time. He knew not '' the great escap- 
ings of ecstatic souls," and it is a pity, 
for the memory of such hours would 
have brightened his journey with oases 
of lucid joy. Whereas he lived in a dun- 

50 



9 
colored world, sensitive to its plaintive 
minor note, under a sky as grey as a 
tired face. So far as is known he form- 
ulated no system, though he was quite 
emphatic in his denial of certain doc- 
trines of the creeds as they were taught 
— the atonement, for example, the mir- 
acles, and the dogma of eternal hell. But 
all who stood near him felt that in a 
mystic and poetic way he was a man of 
faith, even if the cast of his mind made 
many things dim which to others 
seemed clear. 

Years of meditation and sorrow had 
brought him a faith of his own — a kind 
of sublime fatalism in which truth and 
right will win as surely as suns rise and 
set. This assurance fed his soul and was 
the hidden spring of his strength, his 
valor, and his unbending firmness, the 
secret at once of his character and of his 
prophetic insight. Holding to the moral 
order of the world, he knew that truth 
will prevail whatever may be the posture 
of the hour. In his moods of melan- 
choly, which were many and bitter, he 
threw himself upon this confidence, not 

5/ 



so much in formal prayer — though that 
was his last resort — as in a deep inner 
assurance in which he found peace, and 
power. Some one asked his wife about 
his religion and she replied, "It is a 
kind of poetry." Her insight was del- 
icate and true; his faith was none other 
than a simple, home-spun morality 
touched with poetry. 

For, with all his solid common sense, 
his fine poise of reason, and his wise 
humor, at bottom Lincoln was a mystic 
— that is, one who felt that the unseen 
has secrets which are known only by 
minds fine enough to hear them. The 
truth is that, in common \^th all the 
great leaders of men, he had much of 
this fineness of soul in himself — a win- 
dow opening out into the Unseen, whence 
great men derive their strength and 
charm. This it was that gave to 
his words a quality of their own, 
and they seem to this day full of 
ever new prophetic meanings. No man 
of state in this land ever made so 
deep a religious impression and ap- 
peal as Lincoln did in his last days. 

52 



Poetry had made friends with logic, 
and the very soul of the man 
shone in his words and work of mercy, 
in the dignity and pathos of his life, in 
his solicitude to heal the wounds of a 
war he had sought to avert. Such a 
character inspires a kind of awe. Men 
bow to it, and are touched with a min- 
gled feeling of wonder and regret. 

IX 

Of all the great rulers of men, Lincoln 
is to this day at once the most dearly 
human and the most sincerely revered. 
He was a man of artless and unstudied 
simplicity; a lawyer with the heart of a 
humanitarian ; a man of action led by 
a seer-like vision ; a humorist whose heart 
was full of tears ; as unwavering in jus- 
tice as he was unfailing in mercy. Such 
a man the times demanded, and such in 
the providence of God was given to his 
country and his race. 

On the virgin soil of the West he grew, 
as a tree grows — only, his roots ran 
both ways, down into the dark earth 

53 



and up into the Unseen — a man, as 
Grady said, in whose ample nature the 
virtues of Puritan and Cavalier were 
blended, and in the depths of whose 
great soul the faults of both were lost 
— ' ' not a law-breaker, but a law-maker ; 
a fighter, but for peace; a calm, grave, 
strong man; formidable, sad; facing 
down injustice, dishonesty, and crime ; 
and dying ' in his boots ' in defense of 
an ideal — of all world-types distinctive 
to us, peculiar, particular, and unique." 
Simple as ^sop, yet subtle as an ori- 
ental; meditative as Marcus Aurelius, 
yet blithe as Mark Twain ; as much of a 
democrat as Walt Whitman, yet devoid 
of that vague, dreamy egotism, he stood 
in the White House a high priest of 
humanity in this land, where are being 
wrought out the highest ideals of the 
race. All now know that the Union was 
the one mastering idea of his life, and 
that whoever else might let go of faith, 
or sink into self-seeking, or play fast 
and loose with truth, that would Lin- 
coln never. lie was a prophet of the 
political religion of his country — tall 

54 



of soul, gentle, just, and wise, and of his 
fame there will be no end. 

Our nation makes a wise profession 
of ideals when it pays tribute to Abra- 
ham Lincoln, for that within him which 
we honor is the saving grace of the re- 
public. On the distant slopes of fame 
we begin to see that homely, humorous, 
sad, strong, tender man as he was, and 
as few saw him while he lived. No one 
need fear that his real image will be 
lost in a haze of reverent and grateful 
memory, for he becomes more real and 
more unforgetable every year. There is 
no Lincoln myth. Fable falls away 
from his simple human majesty as we 
stand before his later portraits, looking 
into that great face, with its blend of 
light and shadow, its calm, level gaze, 
so frank, so benign, and withal so firm 
and far-seeing. Nothing that unfolding 
Time discloses diminishes his noble, he- 
roic, pathetic stature, and the nation 
grows, when it grows at all, up to, but 
never away from him. 

Still, and always, when we look back 
at Lincoln and see him amidst the vicis- 

55 



situdes of his life, it is the man that we 
honor — a plain, honest, kindly man, 
sound of heart, full equally of pity and 
humor, who knew that humanity is 
deeply wounded and who tried to heal 
it; caring much more to deserve praise 
than to possess it; not free from fault 
and therefore rich in charity, — a fellow 
to the finest, rarest, truest souls now or 
ever to be " citizens of eternity." 



56 



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